'Bus Stop' pulling into Delta College

The cast members didn’t know what Life Magazine was, but otherwise, the actors seem to have taken to director Ashlee Temple’s decision to stage William Inge’s 1955 play “Bus Stop.”

“Throughout the play there are timeless lessons; they’re riddled throughout the play,” said Marcus Richard, a 19-year-old theater major at San Joaquin Delta College who plays the cowboy Virgil in the campus production that opens Friday. “Virgil himself says, 'You can’t spend your whole life depending on a buddy.' That can be applicable to any time, any generation. Buddies can take you so far, then you really have to depend on yourself. It’s a timeless lesson.”

“Bus Stop” is probably most noted for the film version starring Marilyn Monroe, but it is a play that Temple said she’s always wanted to do.

“We had originally scheduled a play called ‘Foreigner,' ” the third-year Delta professor said. “It’s funny, a play written in the '80s, but there’s this comic scene at the end that involves the KKK, which doesn’t sound funny. I got increasingly uncomfortable over the summer about doing (that) play. I didn’t want to put my students through that and decided, 'Let’s do something else.' ”

“Bus Stop,” which will run two weekends at Delta’s Alfred H. Muller Studio Theatre, was a strong choice, Temple said.

“It’s a great play for actors, really an actors’ play,” Temple said. “As I was getting into it, I really, really liked the play. Now, I love this play. I keep digging and digging and it keeps revealing little gems.”

“Bus Stop” is set outside of Kansas City in a diner where passengers on a bus have stopped late one night to get out of a blizzard. A group of eight — diner staff, locals and those from the bus — spend the night sharing stories.

“It loosely reminds me of ‘The Canterbury Tales' from Chaucer,” Temple said. “Strangers come together, tell tales, connect and then part, probably never to see each other again. It’s a play about connecting, loneliness and love.”

For Richard, connecting to Virgil was fairly simple.

“I connect with him on a personal level,” said Richard, a 2016 graduate of East Union High School in Manteca. “It’s not often where I feel like the role is an extension of myself, but I feel that this time.”

Virgil is an older cowboy who has taken young Bo Decker under his wing, serving as a father figure.

“He alludes to having this one romance, a lady friend way back in the day,” Richard said. “He was courting her, but she was higher up in social status than he was. She was from the city. He got scorned and swore off of romance. Something about that makes me laugh. He’s talking to Bo throughout the play, because Bo is also having romantic troubles.”

The role stretches Richard in a new way, he said, and not just because he had to learn to play the guitar and chew tobacco, although he’s substituting beef jerky for real chew.

“This play’s showed me how much actual work goes into building a character from the ground up,” Richard said. “I feel like I’m going to carry this, that Virgil is going to be the one role I always compare myself to going forward. This is a really good role for me.”

For Dhestiny Roberts Auer, playing restaurant owner Grace Hoylard is a good role, too. One that’s challenging.

Grace is in her 40s. Auer is 19, a 2016 graduate of Lincoln High School.

“I have always kind of hung around older people, always communicated with them,” Auer said. “My mom was a teacher when I was in elementary school, and I would always go and talk to the other teachers. I picked up the mannerisms they would have. When you’re playing a role like that, you think about when you stand, that you’d stand differently than someone with more energy, someone 19 years old. You’d speak differently. I think about how I carry myself, how I walk.”

There isn’t much action in the show. It takes place in one location, the three-table diner, where the local sheriff is a regular along with the bus drivers who stop there. Occasionally there’s an interesting rider.

“It’s a very stationary show,” Auer said. “That leaves a lot of room for character relationships and character development.”

Even if those characters were drawn more than 60 years ago, they’re still worth recreating.

“Loneliness and love are the two big themes in the show,” Auer said. “Intimate sort of love or non-intimate love, everyone’s looking for that no matter what age you are. These characters, how they deal with that, it’s relatable. Most, if not all, of the audience will find themselves in one of the characters.”